Separate from the Herd
by CyaeghaUK
Summary: I wrote this as an exercise in writing a short story from the point of view of an alien creature. I have always liked the Pierson's Puppeteers from Larry Niven's Known Space series, so here is my take on these creatures.


**Separate from the Herd**

There are worst things than being alone_,_ he mused… actually no, this is the worst thing that could to happen to a Puppeteer... Puppeteer? …To a citizen. He had spent far too much time living among humans; now he was thinking like one of them. He felt shivers run down his necks. He surrendered to the urge to groom his mane. He adjusted, tucked and readjusted but no matter what he did he could not get it right. He tried curling up into a ball but regardless of where he put his heads he was unable to find comfort. He was just too fidgety.

He was regarded as insane by members of his species. There were few able to do what he had done: leave the herd but even an insane Citizen needs a psychological fourth leg and his was gone. Despite how far away he was, or how long the mission, there was always the thought that he would eventually return to the Fleet, once again to be with his own species and to smell genuine herd scent instead of the synthetic one aboard ship. Scientists assured him that they were the exact same chemical compounds but he could smell the difference.

He assessed his situation. The instrumentation was still working, as far as he could tell, though far from optimal. Checking the read-outs revealed that much of the cabling had been sheered and where a wireless back-up had taken over. The on-board systems were working, just more slowly. All external scanners and sensors were off-line, presumably destroyed: such was the peril of attaching them to non-hull mountings. General Products hull integrity, status intact. Otherwise would have been unexpected but even so it was still a relief. The rest of the ship had not fared so well. The stasis capsule had saved his life but much of the ship was wrecked. Life support was functional, but two layers of redundancy were gone. He would eat, drink and breathe for the foreseeable future. The power plant was still intact but there were some structural stresses. Now that was a worry. It was designed to survive a high energy impact but even Citizen technology had its limits. There was nothing he could do about it now; he moved on…

Next, he assessed his surroundings to estimate the level of threat. He had crashed on an airless ball of rock in orbit about a star that humans classified as a yellow dwarf, despite the fact they appeared white to human eyes. The threats? Radiation could be discounted, the hull would protect him from any emitted by the star and also from cosmic rays. No, the threat was from the vacuum of space. The first priority was to ensure that potential hull breaches could be sealed off to keep the ship's solitary occupant safe and alive. Solitary - not a word used in polite society and the concept made his legs quiver.

Momentarily, he considered going outside to assess the damage but the risk was too great. His thoughts drifted back to the humans he had studied; doubtless, a human pilot would have gone outside with barely a second thought. Despite all of the years spent studying humans, and other aliens, he had yet to gain an understanding of their attitude towards risk. Their languages had words for risk-averse individuals and they were _always _derogatory. How a sentient being could not only regard risk as acceptable but also to seek it out, to embrace it, was something utterly alien and beyond rational comprehension.

Again, he checked the hull integrity. It was intact. Atmospheric pressure had not dropped since last time he had checked it. His fear subsided but was not dispelled. A certain sense safeness was beginning to form, albeit fragile.

As his mind cleared, his training become hindmost in his thoughts. First thing to do to prevent panic was to stand with fore-legs apart. So that was what he did. His tutor had taught that this stance altered the brain chemistry and changed blood flow. The hind leg got an extra boost of blood in readiness to kick. His instructor had also told him that the kick of a Citizen could kill or seriously maim a Kzin. He could not imagine himself kicking a Kzin; some things were beyond even an insane Citizen. Whether or not there was any truth to any of this, it seemed to be working. He now stood firm and took control of the situation, at least, that was what he told himself.

Feeling the most confident he had been since emerging from stasis, he continued to follow the training. Herd scent: the calming and soothing scent of the herd was proven to reduce stress and the levels of flight hormones. Food and drink: for the brain to work efficiently it needed fuel and to be properly hydrated. Make a plan: working out how he was going to get out of this mess that was the difficult part.

"Separate from the Herd." It was an expression that was used freely by Citizens every day without a second thought. He guessed that its original usage, way back in the mists of time, were literal rather than the modern figurative, for example, being the only Experimentalist in a room of Conservatives was considered to be "separate from the herd". The literal meaning of the expression was weighing on his mind rather too heavily as he surveyed the hyperdrive. Verdict: it was now little more than a collection of metal parts ready for recycling. He was about as separate from the herd as it was possible to be.

He stood there, legs apart, assessing his situation. He was beginning to think that standing in this position was nothing more than a pile of half chewed grass because right now his legs felt like jelly and he believed that if he were to kick with his back leg he would collapse in an undignified heap.

Thankfully, the ship's thrusters were still operational. Thankfully? If he escaped from the planet where would he go? Yes, he could get off this unnoticed and insignificant rock; he could never catch up to the Fleet of Worlds on thruster power alone. He thought about where he might go where a Puppeteer — he was thinking like a human again — where a Citizen would be safe and wait for assistance. Safe, the key word was "safe", where could he go that was safe? That question was hindmost in his brain. He would have to go into stasis. It would take so long to get there that anything could happen during his journey, especially now that the herd was fleeing and was not guiding the other species.

Various scenarios formed in his mind. He might be found by a Pak ramscoop, or perhaps by a ship crewed by vengeful humans working for ARM, or perhaps a ship of hungry Kzinti. His forelegs shook uncontrollably. Maybe it would take so long to be discovered that by the time it happened his kind would have been forgotten or worse still he might continue until the wave of lethal radiation caught up with him. The possibilities were endless. He tried to think of a low-risk scenario that led to his safe rescue and a return to the herd. For the first time in his life he was genuinely missing being with humans: they were so much better at dealing with risk.

The strength in his left leg gave way. He tried to compensate but it was no use. He fell to the floor.

His two heads emerged from under his torso. He was still in the engine room in front of the hyperdrive. He had no memory of curling up and entering a catatonic coma nor a sense of how long he had been out. He stood, shaking out his mane. The time out must have done him good; he was feeling much better and was ready to continue the task of assessing the damage to the ship. It was but a tiny jump by stepping disc to check out the condition of the thrusters.

They had survived remarkably well. In fact, he found it odd that the thrusters should be operational and pretty much intact while the hyperdrive was useless. The thrusters had not escaped unscathed from the crash but there was no damage beyond the reach of a thorough service. The more he thought about it, the odder it seemed.

There was nothing he could do here so it was a quick step back to the hyperdrive. He tongued the controls and ran a full systems check. Better to be thorough, better to make sure he had missed nothing. Structurally, it was still intact; there was little in the way of physical damage and yet it was completely inoperative. Granted, he was no expert when it came to hyperdrive technology but the idea that the damage was inconsistent with what might be expected from the crash refused to go away.

The engineers who had fitted the ship had told him not worry about any of its systems. They had installed multiple layers of redundancy. So, it was possible that one too few redundancy had been installed in the hyperdrive or, more likely, something nefarious had happened.

He decided to go over the events that led to his crash. He had been sat in the pilot's seat watching the mass indicator when, without warning, he found himself in normal space. He had panicked, as any Citizen would. An unidentified fault in the hyperdrive had caused it to fail. Hyperdrive shunts built by Citizens did not have unidentified faults. In fact, faults unidentified or otherwise, were not a feature of any Citizen technology as far as he was aware.

His sensors had revealed that he was near to the outskirts of an unchartered system. It was a single star with a catalogue number and a spectral analysis: such was the extent of Citizen knowledge. He had set the autopilot to take the ship onto a course into orbit around the star and then he had rolled up into a ball to quiver with fear, as was only natural.

In retrospect, it was clear he had not been thinking clearly. Fearing sabotage or, worse still, space piracy he had chosen to land on a small planet, safely out of sight. Normally, he would have let the ship's automatic systems do the job but this time he got his mouths on the job and landed the ship himself. He came down too steep and far too fast. The stupidity of it stung as the memories resurfaced. If he had not gone into stasis he would not been stood here to feel embarrassed about it. The one advantage of his solitude was that there was no one to witness his shame.

Getting back to the here and now, he studied the results of the damage assessment. Some circuits were burnt out caused by a current overload. Current overload? There should be multiple systems in place to prevent that from happening. He felt his right leg tremble. There were spare parts aplenty in stores; he needed to get his mouths busy.

Five days later he had finished replacing the damaged parts; he spent another day testing. While not particularly arduous work, he had found it exhausting. There was only one way to found out if his repairs had worked: pilot the ship to the edge of interstellar space and try it. The thought terrified him.

However, he was exhausted. He did not trust the autopilot to take him out of the system, at least not without him being awake to keep an eye on it. No, it was better to rest, he decided and pilot the ship after he was refreshed. There were no predators nearby.

He stepped into the recreational area and settled down onto a three-legged stool. The environment controls were within easy reach and he flooded the room with herd scent. He could not be with other members of his species but having their, albeit artificial, scent in the air was not a bad second best under the circumstances.

One of his heads turned towards the huge vid-screen that was one of the walls of his rec-room. There were multiple cracks across it. He wondered if he could fix it. An image of a herd of Citizens would be most welcome right now but his brain and his lips protested: no more manual work!

Instead, he set to work straightening his mane. There was no one here to judge his appearance but that did nothing to diminish the need to groom. On reflection, he found grooming to be much better for his state of mind than the legs apart stance. If he ever got back, he would have to give some very stern feedback to the Citizen who had given that bad advice to him.

The blood flowed freely in his arteries and his rear leg felt strong and ready to kick anything. Unfortunately, his front legs felt weak and wobbly.

He awoke and realised with great disappointment that he had been dreaming. He had been in a large and predator-free meadow with thousands of his fellow Citizens. The herd galloped across it as one: a great stampede. The wind had felt wonderful rushing through his mane but alas the tyranny of the waking world had reasserted itself and here he was on his crash-landed space ship, alone.

On the plus side, he was feeling refreshed and ready for anything, well almost anything. "Ready for anything", it was a human expression, not something a Citizen would normally say. He was thinking like a human again. The thought weighed heavily on his mind – how abhorrent but maybe that was what he needed right now. At least his front legs had stopped shaking.

"Let's do this." He said the words out loud. In the humans' language the words sounded right. They had a "ring", as humans would say (he did not really understand the expression: human voices were incapable of reproducing a ringing sound and therefore it was not a feature of any human language but it sounded good). In his native language it sounded ridiculous, at least it did inside his brain.

He stepped to the bridge and settled onto the pilot's stool. The ship shook worryingly but he coped with it by repeatedly telling himself that it was safer to leave than to remain behind. He just about managed to believe it.

The ship's external sensors were nothing more than a memory but he could see the stars through the transparent hull and was therefore able to point his ship in the right direction after escaping the gravity of his host planet. The journey was uneventful. It nearly always was through the vast emptiness of normal space.

He was on his way now. He had made the first steps towards facilitating his own rescue. The plain was predator free. He was hindmost of his situation.

He left the bridge and stepped in to the observation deck. Not even an insane Citizen would rely on external sensors alone. In here were telescopes he could use to plot his position. Once he had that and he was far enough out of the star's gravity well he could send a hyperwave message to the Fleet and await rescue. He was not looking forward to explaining how he had managed to crashland but there were fates worse than humiliation. He considered the possibility of being sentenced to a few years labour on one of the agri-worlds. He found the prospect appealing.

The telescopes on the observation deck were only sensitive to electro-magnetic waves of the visible portion of the spectrum, those wavelengths that could penetrate a General Products hull. The remains of the sensors for the rest of the spectrum were mounted on the outside of the hull. In theory, it should be easy to find some familiar stars and plot his position and bearing. In practice, he was not a skilled astronomer.

The first thing he had to do was plot his location on his course through space. The calculation was simple. He knew how long he had spent in hyperspace, he knew his velocity relative to normal space. Multiply the two together and he had his result. Now he had his location in space he had to match the pattern of stars he could see outside to the pattern of stars in the memory banks. Citizen astronomers had catalogued and plotted the orbits of countless millions of stars in the Galaxy.

Someone had once told him that there were more Citizens alive today than stars shining in the Galaxy. He wondered if it were true. As he looked out at the countless points of light in the sky, he, somehow, doubted it. He found this line of thought chilling and so forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

If he still had the external telescopes his task would have been much simpler. Finding the positions of millisecond pulsars and X-ray sources would have given him a much more manageable sample set of stars with which to do his calculations.

The ship continued inexorably towards the outer system while he studied the stars and compared them with his star maps. He extracted spectral analyses from the data he obtained from the on board telescopes and plotted the positions of blue supergiant stars. It took time but he eventually managed to plot the local distribution in space to calculate his position. It took many days for him to complete his work. It had not occurred to him that he would be off course; if the ship was where it was supposed to have been, the task would have been much simpler. He was in a little explored section of the Galaxy; there were no known spacefaring aliens within easy reach.

The more he thought about it the more he came to one inescapable conclusion: sabotage. Such a thing was beyond the capability of a Conservative therefore it must have been planned and perpetrated by one of his fellow Experimentalists. An alien would not have enough information to accomplish such a feat unless it had obtained it from a Citizen. That seemed unlikely; once sensitive information regarding Citizen technology was passed to an alien, it was passed over permanently. The risk that that information could be used against Citizens as a species was far too great. Not even an insane Citizen would consider such a foolhardy action.

He had studied and worked with humans for a long time: they would make excellent predators of his species, given the opportunity. He felt more afraid of humans now than he had ever done while in their presence.

He let out a whine with clear harmonics denoting despair.

He was assaulted by the stench of his own waste when consciousness returned. He let out a surprised yelp and fled to his personal quarters. He immediately trotted into the shower; it felt good to be clean again. Next, he visited the autodoc to check that he had not picked up an infection. He clambered in and let the device work. Thankfully, he came up clear.

He stepped back to the room where he had soiled himself. He activated the automated housekeeping and ordered it to clean up the mess. He returned to the stepping disc and went to the bridge. He checked the ship's course, which revealed he was well on his way towards the outer system. It was here, as he stared at the chronometer, that he realised he had been out for just over three days. It was now that his brain acknowledged his hunger pangs. The ship had not deviated from its course therefore he felt safe enough to step into the kitchen to eat.

The grass seemed sweeter than usual. He tongued the control that increased the amount of herd hormone in the room. It was comforting but he know his situation had not improved.

His thoughts returned to his distant life back on the Fleet of Worlds. The Hindmost himself had awarded him with the right to become a parent. His insanity had ruled him out previously but the success of his studies of and dealings with humans had overcome this obstacle or so he had been told. He considered the reasons why this might be. Was it because the Fleet needed more of the right kind of insane Citizen, able to leave the herd or was it because the Hindmost was not expecting him to return? He wondered if he would ever discover the truth and whether or not it was better not to find out…

With the satisfaction of a good graze and a full belly he returned to the bridge. He felt restless with the need to occupy himself but there was nothing to do. The ship followed its course inexorably without requiring the intervention of a pilot so he kept himself busy by making another complete check of the ship. As expected, he found no more faults. He ran the diagnostic on the hyperdrive again: zero faults. He studied the holographic readout wanting to believe it but that particularly crucial part of his ship had failed before without reporting a fault. What was preventing it from failing again? He was no engineer so there was no way he could do a thorough investigation to discover why it had failed at least not without spending who knows how long studying hyperdrive technology. There were many Citizens with more of an engineering inclination than he who were unable to grasp the concepts of the technology. He was only an alien liaison, he did not fancy his chances. The more he thought on it the more he realised that using the hyperdrive to get back to the Fleet of Worlds was dangerous perhaps too dangerous.

The way he saw it, he had two possibilities: send a hyperwave message to the Fleet requesting aid or attempt a rendezvous with it. The former seemed the obvious choice but he had no idea who was responsible for sabotaging his ship. Would the culprits be the ones crewing the rescue party? The thought of it was like a stalking predator just out of sight. The alternative could hardly be described as safe either.

It took him five days to overcome the paralysis of indecision. During those five days he had made his decision, unmade his decision and changed his mind more times than he could possibly count before spending the final day curled up in a ball.

The decision was made: he would call for help. It was better to die at the mouths of those who had put him in this predicament than to die alone in space, lost, forgotten and separate from the herd. At least, he might have the satisfaction of some answers.

He steadied himself, assumed the legs apart stance and tongued the controls. Nothing happened. The hyperwave had failed. The strength drain from both his necks and his heads flopped onto the console. The urge to kick with his hind leg welled up in his mind but this was vetoed by the strength draining from there too.

There was only one course of action open to him, so, after his despair had passed, he set to work,

The Fleet's destination was the Magellanic Clouds, as the humans called them, two dwarfs that were making a close approach to the Galaxy. Gravity had distorted both and would continue to do so in the future. In fact, it looked like the larger and closer one was tearing apart the smaller. The primary target was the larger, which was believed to be on a parabolic trajectory around the Galaxy, headed in the direction of the Galaxy's south pole. Such was what he learned from the ship's library of information.

Riding a dwarf galaxy away from the predatorial aliens of the main Galaxy might be a good idea but no one knew what species had evolved there. Some Experimentalists had expressed the opinion it might be sterile due its low metallicity but how could they be sure? He had heard the theory that the long term plan was for the Fleet to return to the post-explosion core, by then sterilised and ripe for re-colonisation. Unsurprisingly for a Citizen in contact with aliens, no one had confided with him regarding the Fleet's ultimate plans. Working out an intercept course was more difficult than it seemed: the object appeared stationary in the night sky but he knew it was moving at a high speed relative to the Galaxy.

He called up the course on which the Fleet traversed and plotted a parallel course through the Galaxy. The Fleet would arrive ahead of him but that was not a bad thing. The ship was now on its way.

He felt fatigue getting the better of him. Time for food, he reflected. As his hoof touched the stepping disc that would take him out of the cockpit, he felt a sense of inevitability but also of accomplishment. If it were possible to overcome his current predicament, he believed he had done everything he possibly could have done to make it happen.

The synthesised leaves tasted sweet. He tongued the herd scent up to maximum. He closed his eyes and imagined himself to be in a pasture surrounded by the herd, grazing as his ancestors did for millions of years but it was a short-lived fantasy. His meal finished he set to grooming his mane.

Humans had a tradition: a person condemned to death was given one last meal before sentence was carried out. He wondered if he had just eaten his last meal. The thought should have terrified him but he was strangely calm.

He stepped back into the cockpit and checked his trajectory. All was fine. The thrusters were working perfectly. He programmed the stasis field to switch off after he reached the edge of the Galaxy. From there he could recalculate his trajectory to his destination.

He had done everything he could think of; the only thing left for him was to active the stasis field.


End file.
